Instant Banana Ice Cream was part of a 3 course meal he prepared in front of an audience for one of his shows and it seemed fun enough to try at home.

Rapid icecream ingredients

My food mixer is only small, so I chopped 1 banana up into chunks and froze it over night. I then mixed it with a couple of tablespoons of this buttermilk thing and a few drops of vanilla extract. Whizzing it up into a puree was fun but loud and I don’t think my mixer’s gears liked it, it now makes a really nasty screaming noise when it goes round.

Into the blender

Having said that, it really does work, provided you make it a little thick and then add more buttermilk to get to a useful consistency.

I don’t think it needed the extra sugar, but the buttermilk was too acidic for my taste, perhaps it was too cultured for me. I might try swapping it for some really good natural yoghurt or add a bit of cream as well next time.

Rapid icecream and Rhubarb

I served it with some simply poached yorkshire rhubarb, which was very yummy. Definately going to repeat this one.

The peated flavours come from the barley maltings, the drying kilns were historically fired by peat bricks which allowed the moist barley seeds to absorb phenols from the peat smoke. The strength is measured in phenol parts per million (or pppm), about 75% of this is typically lost during the brewing and distillation process, so don’t be afraid that you’re drinking liquid compost!

With no further ado, to the whiskys!

I managed to spot the St George’s, strongly suspected the Amrut but wasn’t trying too hard for the Japanese or Scottish, there’s too great a range of styles to remember. I was totally thrown by the Connemara’s addition of the sherry maturation, the oily, sickly sweetness of the finish dominated it’s usual signature.

The Amrut Peated Cask Strength consistently scored highly from around the country, we’ve come to expect greatness from Bangalore and this was no exception, there are few 4 year old whiskys that can manage that depth of flavour AND are still suppable at cask strength. The real star of the show for me was the Penderyn, which is something I thought I would never say. It threw off the stereotypical flavours from the Welsh distillery and added some novel fruity sweetness. As Eddie said, you would feel quite comfortable serving it up as an aperitif to the unsuspecting!

The final scores and discussion can be found on the Whisky Lounge Facebook page

The illustration was done using heaped tablespoons and would have been plenty for four people.

Ingredients

4 level tablespoons self-raising flour
4 level tablespoons sugar
2 level tablespoons cocoa powder
1 small egg
3 level tablespoons milk
3 level tablespoons oil
3 level tablespoons cocolate chips, or roughly chopped chocolate (half a mini mars bar would do the job if you really wanted to annoy your dentist)

Method

Add the dry ingredients to your largest mug or a pudding basin and give it a stir

Beat the egg and add it to the mug, along with the milk and oil and stir it a lot until it’s well mixed up and smooth

Pour in the lumps of chocolate and half a teaspoon of your favourite flavouring (vanilla extract or a liqueur would be nice) and loosely stir through

Instant Cake Mix

Put it in a microwave and cook it on maximum for two minutes

If you’re cooking for others, wait for it to cool, turn out and serve with single cream, if you like.

If it’s all for you, just grab an oven glove and a spoon.

Instant Cake

Raymond Blanc is picking on one theme per episode and then filming 2 or 3 demonstration recipes in a corner of his own massive production kitchen at Le Manoir, cut with a video of him visiting another expert in that theme. It’s directed in a documentary style rather than presented straight to camera, which means you get some of the interaction between Raymond and his army of Sous Chefs as well as an insight into how much difference Being Prepared (and having an enormous professionally equipped kitchen) makes.

I’ve watched the first two episodes on the iPlayer so far, Chocolate and Apples and both had recipes that looked excellent and easy to do at home. One of the high points for me was seeing just how simple chocolate mousse is to create but the most entertaining piece so far was Raymond shouting down a corridor for one of his minions to literally run into the orchard and climb trees in his chef’s whites until he finds a handful of Bramley apples, with the camera crew bouncing along after him like Challenge Anneka.

I’m not the only person who’s spotted some omissions though, anything that could be perceived as product placement has been consigned to Auntie’s cutting room floor. This is annoying because brand and the artisans behind it really make a difference when dealing with top-end chocolate, so you can’t go out looking to buy some when Raymond enthuses about the quality of the chocolate he’s using.

It’s presented very naturally, with an awful lot of Voila and Tres Biens interspersed into the commentary which helps keep your attention on what is a rare opportunity to see a master at work

As ever, Eddie’s talk covered way more detailed information than I could ever hope to note down, but unusually for one of these evenings, I can actually read some of my scribblings, although the words make noticably less sense as the whiskys wore on..

The evening started with a pint of remarkably good D.A.V.E. (Dark and Very Enjoyable) from Yorkshire’s Great Heck and a chance to chat to a few of the professionals in the audience, but soon we were swept off to go learn more about Single Malt Whisky.

I managed to scribble a few insider tips came out of the discussion: Isle of Arran is looking very good at the moment and Bruichladdich’s own Port Charlotte is consistently Outstanding. I’m wishing I’d bought a bottle or three when I was there last autumn.

Carrying on from something that Jim McEwan mentioned last September, Eddie said that this year’s Big Thing is wood management, even more whiskys are coming to market that have been aged in extremely specific barrels that the Scottish distillers contracted from the Americans to make and use from specific forests on north facing slopes in the best micro climates. Only time will tell whether this level of detail in the maturation process becomes noticable.

One of the more frequently asked questions is why is Scottish whisky aged in first or second fill Bourbon casks? It’s evolved from pure economy, a second hand Bourbon Cask can be had in quantity for about £50, whereas a top tier Sherry Butte from somebody like Chateaux Y’Chem or Sauternes can fetch easily £500. This is offset by the Sherry barrel being twice the volume of the Bourbon cask and that the sherry effect becomes noticable after only 2 or 3 months whereas spirit cannot be called Whisky until it’s been aged for at least 3 years.

Another Whisky Fact is why 40% and 46% are such commonly used bottling strengths. This comes down to marketing and consumer expectations, 40% is the weakest that the spirit remains clear to look at after chill filtering, whereas 46% is the minimum required if you don’t chill filter. Appearance is incredibly important to the mass market for whisky, which is why the majority is chill filtered.

Enough rambling, on with the whiskys. Glenmorangie’s house style is one of the lightest of all the Speysides, coming from some of the highest, thinnest stills in the country. Notes of fruity citrus and grasses should be present throughout, with perhaps a faintly nutty finish.

* The Astar was the whisky of the night for me, closely followed by the Nectar D’or. Neither are my usual preferred style of Whisky, but they’re both characterful and distinctive and would be a good addition to anybody’s collection.

Ingredients

Makes 2

Half a packet of ready made pastry
2 or 3 new potatoes
3 big or 4 medium shallots
100g mature cheddar
half a teaspoon smoked paprika
a medium egg

Cheese and Onion Pasty Ingredients

Method

Boil the potatoes for about 7 minutes, or until they’re just tender all the way through, but not falling apart

Whilst they’re cooking, finely slice the shallots and start to gently sweat them off in a bit of olive oil or butter.

Chop up the cheese into thin slices

Split the pastry into two, and roll out into circles about 5mm thick. Not too thin, so that it can support its own weight when holding in your hands but not so thick you can’t fit any filling in.

When the potatoes are cooked, drain and leave them to cool, then slice them thinly.

Cheese and Onion Pasty Assembling

Build up the filling in the middle, piling up the layers to get as much filling and as little air in as you can. Add a pinch of paprika on top to give a little colour.

The final step is where the controversy begins, how one folds and crimps one’s pasty is akin to how one wears one’s baseball cap. Allegedly.

I went for the fold it over horizontally and then crimp from the edges back towards the filling approach. Others heavily favour the fold both edges towards the middle and crimp across the top.

Cheese and Onion Pasty Sealed

Thoroughly beat the egg and use a pastry brush to coat the topside of the pasty, including sealing the crimp. This also helps give a nice golden finish.

Bake in a moderate oven for about 25 minutes

I found a handful of good youtube videos showing how to do the traditional Cornish Rope ranging from expert presenters in their own kitchens to a commercial scale piece. You’ll just have to use your imagination for how I did mine (it’s the same, but on its side)

Mine turned out perfectly edible both fresh from the oven and cold for lunch the following day, but this recipe breaks from my tradition in that the readymade shortcrust pastry isn’t as good as properly home made lard pasty pastry for holding its own weight and texture.

Cheese and Onion Pasty

About 4 minutes into this video is a good close up of the process:

Ingredients

Makes 4

250g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 beaten egg
2 tablespoons of sour cream or creme fraiche or yoghurt or something
140ish ml milk
1 heaped tablespoon of cumin seeds
50g melted butter

Method

Mix up the ingredients apart from the butter into a thick dough and knead it for a minute or so until it’s nice and smooth. Don’t add all the milk at once, add it slowly until you get a nice workable consistency. It should not be sticky.

Cover and put it in the fridge for half an hour to rest.

Break the dough up into four and roll it out thinly

Rolled out

Now for the sticky part, brush a very thin layer of melted butter over the top of the dough and concertina it up so that it looks like a fan. Curl the edges of the fan round so that it forms a circle.

Folder and curled up

Roll it out again until it’s quite thin. Thinner than we managed.

Ready to cook

It should just about fill a frying pan, but still be thicker than a pancake. Give it about 1 to 1.5 minutes on each side until it’s golden and crispy. Don’t cook it so quickly that the outside burns and the inside’s still raw though.

Parathas

First Google yourself the double chocolate muffin recipe of your choice. Mine isn’t quite my own yet, so I can’t republish it here just now.

Prepare a thick cherry syrup mix with cherries, sugar and a teaspoon of kirsch or rum if you’ve got some. You don’t need much, 1 or 2 cherries per muffin and a teaspoon of syrup is plenty. Or just open a tin of ready made cherry pie filling (it was half price and just leapt into my shopping basket…).

Black Forest Muffins In Progress

Once you’ve made up the muffin batter, put two large tablespoons into a muffin casing and make a well in the centre (a pair of chopsticks works well for this). Into the well, place one or two cherries and a teaspoon of the syrup, then cap it by placing another tablespoon of muffin batter on top. Repeat.

Black Forest Muffins

Bake in a medium oven for 15-18 minutes, leave to rest for 3-5 minutes depending upon willpower and then serve slightly broken open with the cream of your choice. Whipped cream would be traditional, I would go for either clotted cream or creme fraiche.

Finished muffins

For now, however, I’m going to contain myself into a bit of a rave about my latest toy. It’s one of those tools that’s going to have to last my lifetime, but I’ve recently succumbed to temptation and treated myself to a Santoku, made from Damascus folded steel by Tojiro.

After deciding which knife to get, there was a lot of shopping around to be done. It turns out that the cheapest place was York’s very own Barnitts! Whilst they had to order it in especially for me (“these don’t exactly fly off the shelves you know”), it was still £45 cheaper than the RRP. This isn’t exactly an impulse buy, I don’t part with that much money at all easily, so being an Engineer, I made sure the specification was right before I chose my product

Unlike its cheaper counterparts from, say, QVC shopping channel, the pattern isn’t so much painted onto the blade as reflected out from inside it. Beautiful stuff.

Tojiro 180mm Santoku

It wasn’t just the appearance that I chose this material for the blade, however,I wanted steel that was malleable enough to be able to be sharpened but hard enough to keep its edge once it got it, anything over 60 on the Rockwell scale would do. I also wanted a sensible grip on the handle. I’ve tried a few other knives, IO Shen were good, but I felt were edged out by Tojiro. Despite their innovative sharpening gadgetry and the genius marketing man that is Mr Global, Min, I don’t rate Global’s style at all (although they sell a huge volume of good quality knives to Western Europe, so I’m in the minority with this opinion).

The weight is perfect for me, it’s heavy enough to have a heft of its own and unlike my French knives, the balance is slightly forward of the handle which makes my life easier. The shape of the blade is a great compromise between piercing, chopping and rocking whilst still being thick enough for me to rest my knuckles against whilst using (big hands aren’t always a bonus). Whilst I will still use my 6 and 8 inch Sabatier cooks knives, it’s immediately clear why this shape of blade outsells all others in Japan.

I thought I’d used sharp knives before, but Oh My God. I chopped a stir fry this evening and I eventually had to be told me to stop giggling before I cut myself. Not a chance with that knife, it was completely controlled. I wasn’t bored enough to make a video of it, but this will cut through a ripe tomato, perfectly, under its own action alone. No need to put the point through the skin and cut back through it, or to draw the cutting edge across the skin like a serrated edge.

It literally cut through vegetables as if they weren’t there. Now I begin to underst how TV chefs do their rapid fire showing off action, they use properly sharp knives.

Spiced Pineapple

I didn’t really follow a recipe as such, just roughly cubed the pineapple and poached it in a light syrup along with a couple of sticks of cinnamon, a teaspoon of ground ginger, half a dozen cloves and a star anise. Then stored it hot in kilner jars so they would vacuum seal.

Sloe Gin Ingredients

I had the chance to pick a couple of kilos of Sloe berries last weekend so we could finally get around to making some Sloe Gin. It’s too sweet for my taste, but I know plenty of people who do like it. Buying a year’s supply of Gin all in one go was a bit wallet stretching, but it’s not like it’ll go off.

Sloe Gin. Fresh and after 1 day infusing

The Sloe Gin recipe was a bit loose, but went along the lines of about 1 pound of berries and 100g of sugar per litre of gin. Or as J tells it: “Half fill whatever sized bottle you’ve got with Sloe berries, add a couple of handfuls of sugar and top it off with Gin”. Then turn it once a day for a week, then once a week for a month and then once a month until you’ve run out of patience and want to drink it.

Wikipedia’s write up of fudge is a pretty good summary of the chemistry involved, but what follows is my take on how simple you can get away with. Equal parts of thick cream and sugar, boiled up to 116 degrees C and left to cool. Add flavourings to taste. If you use a good flavoursome sugar, you probably won’t need to add anything else, I split mine into two so I could try Rum’n'Raisin and traditional Vanilla.

Ingredients

Makes 450g of fudge

284ml double cream
284g golden granulated sugar
1 tbsp rum
1 tbsp vanilla essence
handful good raisins

Fudge ingredients

Method

Mix the cream and sugar in a pan and very gently heat to a simmer, stir until the sugar is all dissolved. The best tip I found for telling that is when you no longer feel the sugar crystals against the bottom of the pan.

Fudge in the pan, with the sugar thermometer

Take to a rolling boil, careful not to boil it over the pan until sufficient water has evaporated to let the sugar heat to 116C. Mine took about 20 minutes on a medium heat until my sugar thermometer read ‘Soft Ball’

Fudge, just off the boil

Whilst that’s going on, line a shallow tray with greaseproof paper to cool and shape your fudge. I tried clingfilm as well. Greaseproof worked perfectly, a double thickness of clingfilm didn’t.

It’s at this point you should have a reasonably thick, golden caramel coloured gloopy mix which is still fluid enough to pour.

Fudge cooling in the trays

Mix in your flavourings and pour into your tray to set, mine was set in 30 minutes at room temperature.

To help resist the temptation to eat it too soon, I got a couple of tablespoons worth from scraping the pan to, err, check quality. Yes, that’s it.

Next time

Next time around I’m definitely doing a double quantity, to try to get a much thicker result and also because it’s dead tasty (I suspect my dentist would disagree).

I’ll also be more organised and soak the fruit in the rum overnight, that would make a huge difference to the final texture and experience. I used generic rum to get the recognisable taste out of it, I did briefly consider using the Renegade Rum I’ve got, but I suspect Jim McEwan would drive down from Islay just to slap me.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make a roll effect either. It would need to be cooled on a sheet of greaseproof to about 1cm thickness but only left for about 5 minutes, enough to hold its shape but not to properly set. Then melt a couple of bars worth of chocolate, spread the choc on the fudge and then roll on a bamboo mat. Serve sliced.

Or cheat and mix in a deep tray and use a pair of chopsticks to very gently mix the two into a marble pattern.

There was a masterclass in Amrut whisky at this year’s festival, so I was keen to get caught up with what I’d missed out on. It was also an opportunity to show off my Bruichladdich Academy t-shirt, which I’m not too abashed to say was well received and led to some good banter over the evening

The Indian malt whisky was all produced by Amrut (I won’t link to their site, Google reckons it’s harmful) Distilleries, who have three main and distinctive expressions released in the UK at the moment, all available at bottle (40-50%) and cask strength (> 61%).

Eddie did as good a job as usual matching them up to three Scottish whiskys, to make sure we were comparing like with like. I don’t think I’ve actually written up a Whisky Lounge Tasting before, so I’ll go through the format in a bit of detail. I would say I’d make careful reference to my notes from the evening, but apart from names and numbers, I can’t make head nor tail of my scribblings. You’d think my handwriting was already as unintelligible as it’s possible to get, but just wait until 6 stiff doubles have cast their votes too..

This was a fairly select gathering, half-term was working against us, so Eddie had about a dozen pupils for this round of head-to-head tastings. It started off with a lot of background on what was in front of us and what we’re hoping to achieve. Eddie knows Ashok Chokalinga, Amrut’s brand ambassador, pretty well and has absorbed enough about the company and its history to recount it with authority. The banter is interspersed with bits of history, tales of some unique malts that people had been able to get their hands on, discussions of how the festival (rub it in why don’t ye) went etc. Hopefully the festival will have two sessions next year, which should help matters along somewhat.

The key characteristic of Amrut’s whisky is the accelerated maturation associated with India’s hotter climate than, say, Scotland’s west coast. It doesn’t need a formal age statement because a number of people will, rightly or wrongly, severely mark down the whisky because it’s, say, only 6 years old. The angel’s share is going to be pretty impressive too, so I’d guess it’s a commercial decision as well as a quality one. Regardless, if you left a single malt spirit in a barrel in their warehouses for 15 to 18 years, I doubt there’ll be too much left in the bottom apart from the strongest, most tanniny oak liqueur imaginable.

Back to the tasting. The whiskies are presented anonymously in 6 numbered glasses. Eddie always puts them in a sensible order to build up your palette as gradually as possible, it takes over an hour for your nose to recover sensitivity from a full ‘hit’ of whisky, so the most flavoursome tend to arrive at the end.

We’re led through the various stages of Tasting a whisky, spending most of the effort on the nose, trying to tease out all the different layers of the scent by holding the glass increasingly closer to your nose whilst smelling. If you just stuck your nose into the glass of a heavily peated, cask strength whisky, you wouldn’t be smelling anything else all evening (but why would you want to?).

The scoring is done on the Eddie scale from 6 to 10 in steps of 0.5. A whisky gets 6 for just showing up and you’re unlikely to ever meet a 10. It’s entirely personal and unscientific, but it does allow regional averages to be compared because there are some very strong geographic trends for people’s whisky taste preferences around the UK.

Unintelligible scribblings

I’ve already mentioned that my sense of smell is a bit broken, so the scenes and flavours my memory throws up to match a scent aren’t necessarily what the rest of the world would. The colours were all very similar, so it’s not worth noting those this time around. Also, as I started to enjoy the whisky more, my notes became noticably more, err, absent,so without much further ado, these are the 6 whiskies, presented in order but with the answers matched in.

I correctly spotted the three Amrut whiskies as they went past during the evening, and was very close to the Bowmore and the Highland Park (Island style whiskys can be hard to split out from Speysides), but then the three Indian expressions are very distinct and I only had three to choose from. Likewise, I know what the shape of a Scottish Single Malt taste is like so spotting ones that were obviously out of kilter was easy.

To be fair, I also bought a bottle of Amrut Fusion the other weekend, just before it was awarded number 3 in the world by Jim Murray (which caused supplies to dry right up), so I’d hoped I’d at least spot that one.

The surprise finish was a small sample of Amrut Peated Cask Strength as an unprecented whisky number 7. This totally demolished the competition and, unfortunately, nearly demolished me too. By this time, my lift home was parked outside and was pointedly looking at its watch, so I sadly made my excuses and left before I made a greater fool of myself.

I’m normally fairly sensible (boring?) when I go out drinking, no more than 3 pints of an evening as a rule, but I do sometimes get hugely over excited when in a friendly crowd and the alcohol’s been flying and there’s a shared topic of conversation you can really get your teeth into. Sadly, there’ve been times in the past when that’s led to an embarrasingly crippling hangover the morning afterwards (I’m thinking Stevenage here..) so I clearly need to take more advice from Yoda. Control, I must learn Control.

Another thing that has been clear for a long while and was reinforced this evening, in case it isn’t bleedin obvious by my collection, I do like an interesting peated single malt. Apparently a sherry finished Connemara has just been released, which is well worth watching out for.

I harvested this year’s apple crop yesterday, another surprisingly generous harvest considering the small stature of the trees and their pots, I also gave up on the tomato vines putting any more growth into their fruit and picked it all green.

The tomato variety, F1 Totem, did well again this year, keeping to a bushy habit despite having plenty of space for its root to run around in. It wasn’t anything like as early to fruit as in previous years, but that’s almost certainly because of the amount of wind that whistles through our garden. I had two containers planted up with it, one longer trough that’s about twice as deep as a grow bag, and a shorter one that’s four times as deep. Despite the roots only going halfway down the compost in the deep trough, its plants did over twice as well as the shallower trough, so that’s worth remembering for next year.

I composted the rest of my courgette and squash vines after their leaves got covered with mildew and pretty much stopped working, although again I took a reasoanble final crop off them. The yellow ball variety, One Ball, did reasonably well, but was too late and didn’t get the chance to develop its dozen or so fruits per fine. The green ball variety, Eight Ball, did better and because its skin is pretty solid, I’m treating just like a squash so am hopeful they’ll keep for a couple of months.

I lifted a few pots of alpine strawberries that showed just how vigorously they can spread when given half a chance, to make room for a collection of red cabbage seedlings that should hopefully mean that next spring I’ll be mostly eating cabbage, as well as finding people with a home for some strawberries

If my chutney making is anything to go by, Autumn is early this year, the previous two years saw me harvesting green tomatoes the last weekend in October, not the first. The local squirrel has been busy stashing away acorns and nuts to make sure we get a few trees growing in odd places next year.

Squirrel, making a getaway

I’m having a go in a slightly different way this time around, in a bid to reduce the simmer time and therefore keep the colour less caramelised, I took out the seeds and soggy bits from the middles of the tomatoes. It was particularly fiddly, but seems to have done the job. I’m also mixing my own pickling spice which I first infused into the white wine vinegar over a slow heat for about half an hour: 1 teaspoon nepal peppercorns, 1 star anise, 1 teaspoon coriander seed, half a teaspoon cloves, 1 sprig rosemary and 4 small sticks of cinnamon. It’s simmering now and will be for another hour or two, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Spices to infuse in the vinegar for pickling

A quick consultation with the RHS Big Book of Everything suggests that I need to leave my Canna and Fushias well alone until the spring before trying to split or root some cuttings which means it’s time to see what spring flowering bulbs are left in the shops. If you give them time to get their roots spread before the frosts hit, they can flower a week or two earlier than if you put them in directly before the spring and stand a greater chance of growing on the rest of the year to flower again next spring.

Whilst the batter is distinctly mauve to it, the cake ended up not very purple at all. It tastes pretty good and stayed pretty moist for a few days now, so I’m happy with the result. Next time, I would gently simmer the apple chunks in some more plum syrup for added purple.

Ingredients

165g self raising flour
55g softened butter
55g granulated sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
3 peeled eating apples
1 beaten egg
100ml plum infused syrup

Method

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C

Cream the egg, butter and sugar together with the whisk, then sieve in the cinnamon and flour whilst continuing to whisk.

When you’ve got it to a consistency of fine breadcrumbs, add the syrup in small doses and continue to whisk. You’re aiming for an airy light, creamy consistency that can still hold its shape.

Finely dice two of the apples and gently fold into the cake batter.

Slightly purple cake batter in the tin

Core, and thinly slice the remaining apple and lay it out along the bottom of your cake tin. Pour over the rest of the batter and gently press it into shape.

Bake in a warm oven for 20-25 minutes, until the top has turned golden brown.

Leave to cool for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to finish cooling.
Use another tablespoon of the plum syrup to make some icing if you prefer.

Slightly purple apple cake

If anything try to pick the plums when they’re slightly underripe so they are firm enough to hold their shape against a sharp knife and when lightly stewed.

Ingredients

Plums
Water
Sugar

Method

Destone the plums by cutting them in half and put them in a large pan.

Plums

Make a heavy syrup by mixing three parts water to one part sugar and pour over the plums, just enough to barely cover them.

Slowly slowly bring to the boil. You want to get some of the water out of the plums and some of the sugar in, without breaking up the structure and shape of the plums.

As soon as it gets to the boil, take off the heat. Use a slotted spoon to remove the plums to some freshly sterilised jars and ladle over syrup to cover. You may want to keep some of the syrup for later use in things like cakes, icing or salad dressings. It would freeze well in small portions.

Seal and label the plums.

Plums Bottled in Syrup

Chutneys are pretty much savoury vegetables mixed with sweet and / or sour fruits with sweet sugar and sour vinegar. The sugar and the vinegar are the preserving agents, which means as always you need more than 5% acid by volume for it to work.

Plum and courgette chutney

Ingredients

Makes about 400g chutney.

half a red onion
250g courgette
250g plums, destoned
125g sugar
125g vinegar
2 tsp mustard seeds
seasoning

Method

Coarsely chop the onion and courgette, aiming for thin slices about two inches long. Hopefully your plums are not overripe so will take being cut without squidging everywhere. Halve them and remove the stones. I wanted a rich purple colour in the finish, so left the skins on.

Gently sweat the onion and courgette in a preserving pan on a low heat until they start to go translucent. Add the plums and continue to heat slowly. After a few minutes the water will start to come out of the fruit and you can bring the mixture up to the boil.

Simmer away for 15-20 minutes to concentrate the juice then add the spice seeds, sugar and vinegar.

Continue simmering over a low heat for two to three hours to reduce it down to a thick chutney. Check the seasoning at this point and adjust to taste. Bottle in a sterile jar when it’s still hot.

Leave for 6-8 weeks to mature if you’ve got the patience.

The results weren’t as refined as some of the other chutneys I’ve made, but it was very piquant and went well with a strong or blue cheese. Definately one of the easier to make conconctions I’ve done, provided you don’t mind the house smelling of vinegar all weekend.

York Wine Fair in the Guildhall

In order to allow as many as possible to experience it, the wine fair was split up into two sessions. We went in the afternoon slot, which turned out to be a good idea because it was very quiet and meant you could monopolise a lot of the suppliers’ time. Apparently they sold about 40 tickets for the afternoon and 140 for the evening.

I don’t know a huge amount about wine so this was a chance to get some of the basics covered. I generally know what I like, but I don’t know much about the gamut of aromas and flavours that wine producers have to play with. I can’t help but compare it to whisky in terms of the processes and market realities, although that’s perhaps a bit abstract to try to convey in conversation (sorry to Martin from Joseph Perrier for rambling off on that tangent!).

The first table I visited turned out to be easily the best of the day. It was a chap named John who has recently set up Find Wine(.co.uk) with a couple of his friends, an online wine selector with a fairly unique twist to it. The idea is to stop buying wine based upon regional style assumptions and what the supermarkets have on special offer that week (month|quarter) and instead to think about it in terms of styles and price points.

In a way it’s similar to what I learnt last week about whisky marketing, most bottles are marketed as a Glen Lovely McTartan 10,12,18 year old which is great if you happen to know what that tastes like, but what if you don’t? Find Wine’s big idea is for them to buy a few dozen cases of what they think tasted pretty good at the time, matched into one of their categories and then sell it on. When that’s all gone, they’ll replace it with something else that’s good at the moment. The opportunities offered by this agile approach are huge, but it only works if you trust them to make these judgments and also for them to maintain the effort required to keep turning it over.

I spoke to John for about 10 minutes or so and I gave up trying to keep up with the barrage of information from him, it was very clear that he knew exactly what he’s talking about in plenty of detail and his tasting notes on the samples of wine he had seemed pretty accurate to my insensitive palette. One of the stories involved which grapes were generally grown on one bank of a river somewhere and which were grown on another! I’m sure that a professional knowledge of terriors should encompass that much geography, but it was still fun. Oh and they said they liked whisky too so might be trying it again with that, which sounded interesting.

The majority of the other suppliers had a theme, be it geographical or otherwise, one was Babich from New Zealand, another was representing Argentina, another was representing the Joseph Perrier Champagne house, and Sainsbury had a representative too to remind us of reality. Interestingly, the ones that weren’t involved in direct sales all had order forms from one of the local wine merchants that set up shop relatively recently, Field and Fawcett, so it wasn’t all ‘this is what you could have won’.

I got to spend a bit of time with the chap from Champagne, learning a bit about the different wines from them. I knew they were all blends, but hadn’t twigged that a lot of the biggest flavours came from red grapes, they just didn’t take the colours and tannins from the skins. Blanc de Blancs means it’s 100% chardonnay. Rose is simply that, but with a longer tail and a pink colour. For obvious reasons he wouldn’t tell me the blend they use in their Vintage bottlings, but a 75/25 mix of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay would be a good place to start. Only about 5% of a given year’s harvest reaches sufficient quality to stand up to the Vintage branding (he said 10% every second year), but commercial reality dictates that you follow your sales with supply which is their NV Yellow Label, so Vintage Champagne keeps its exclusivity. Like whisky, in order to keep to a house style with a variable input, there’s an awful lot of blending going on behind the scenes, between grapes, vinyards and between years. That’s another reason why the volume doesn’t have a single year on the label, because it isn’t from a single year’s harvest. That’s typically what ‘Reserve’ means on a label by the way.

A few of the wines that got asterisks next to them in my notes (apparently taking notes is remarkably uncommon. Is my memory that bad? or am I in the minority of trying to get some real data rather than just trying to drink more than £15’s worth of wine? bloody engineers, you can’t take them anywhere..). I wasn’t fast enough to get round the reds, so if you like white here we go:

Babich’s Sauvignon Blanc. It had an unusual and great smell of tropical fruit, lots of pinapple and mango with hints of the greener smells you get from S-B’s normally. The taste was what you’d expect from a classic S-B, a hit of dry and crisp.

Babich’s Unoaked Chardonnay. I normally can’t abide a taste of Chardonnay (even though it’s mostly what champagne’s made from). Apparently it’s the oak-aging that I can’t stand, because this New Zealand bottling was just wonderful. About 10% of the blend was fermented in Oak, the rest in Steel, so there’s just enough there to give it a body without overpowering the sublety of the grapes. The nose was subtle and fresh and whilst the sample was overchilled, it tasted great. Very green, light and summery, ripening oats or barley I’m told.

Sainsbury had a White Zinfandel based Rose from California (which meant it’s most likely a blend of white and red rather than the usual short maceration from red process). I’m not a fan of Rose, but I had a chemist in tow who is. It smelt slightly smokey, which I rather liked and had a light and sweet body to it.

There’s a Tarrango from Australian that had a gloriously fruity red who’s savoury body survives being lightly chilled and looks like a great replacement for the 2005 Bor Forras that I’ve been hoarding.

There were two wines from the Argentine Colchagua Valley that made it as far as my increasingly incomprehensible notes. A Vordello, the grape that’s normally used in Madiera but this time lightly presented as a fresh and summery wine that had a long acid finish. I also had a bit of a James May moment and discovered Viognier. This white has gone straight into my mental charts in the #2 slot, behind Alsatian Gewurtztraminer. It’s nose was light, apples and melons and pears, the flavour was crisp and dry like a white should be but the middle of its body is a remarkably strong and creamy hit of savoury. I reckon that wine would stand up to a curry. Lets find out..

I finished off with a slightly out of place 1993 Caol Ila that had been finished in Moscatel casks. It wasn’t jaw droppingly good but I’d still give it 8/10 on the Eddie Scale and wasn’t over priced at £35.

Seems that wine distribution and whisky often go hand in hand. Who knew?

Blackberry and Apple Fruit Leather

Ingredients

1lb blackberries
1lb cooking apples
1/2 lb sugar
couple of tablespoons of syrup

Ingredients

Method

Debug the blackberries if you picked them fresh and coarsely chop the apples. Put them into a pan along with the sugar and syrup and slowly bring to the boil.

Stir it all together

Heat through until the apple starts to collapse, there should be plenty of water in the apples and berries if you’re patient enough to release.

and simmer it down

Blitz the mixture into a smooth puree with a mechanical chopper and then very slowly simmer it down until it’s lost over half its volume of water. It will most likely spit bubbles of fruit puree over the kitchen, so covering it in a water that will let the steam escape is recommended.

Pour it over a shallow tray

Take a baking sheet and line it with sturdy greaseproof paper or baking parchment (this is the bit I forgot the first time round) and spread the mixture thinly over the sheet. No more than 5mm thick.

Now the expensive part. You need to dry it out, and if you haven’t got a special food dehydrating machine then you’ll need to use your oven.

After a day drying

It took me about 24 hours at about 50 degrees C in my fan oven to get it to a state where it was sufficiently dry. If it’s still sticky and you can stir it with your finger, it’s not sufficiently dry. You can tell it’s sufficiently dry when you can smoothly pull it away from the backing paper. You must not heat it too much, slowly does it. You are not after jam, you do not want the sugars to caramelise (and you don’t want to be scraping Burnt off your oven for the rest of the weekend).

Blackberry and apple fruit leather

Cut it into strips and store it in an airtight container until you’ve eaten it all. Which if it’s like mine will probably be about Thursday.

Thoughts

If you want to go for the gold star, then I urge you to sieve the mixture before spreading it over the tray. It’s not that picking Blackberry seeds out of your teeth all week isn’t fun, but doing without the seeds makes the mixture more cohesive when it’s thin and it’s a better finished product.

This was largely an idea for how to preserve ingredients that are currently in season, but I think Raspberries or Blackcurrants would go well, although you’d want a more refined sugar and probably a lemon’s worth of juice. Apricot and Mango would be nice too, but the Mango would take yonks to break down.

I wanted to see if I could a touch of the exotic by using palm sugar instead of castor or preserving sugar, but I couldn’t really detect it in the final product. Using a few generous tablespoons of honey would also have worked and seems a bit more authentic somehow because it’s hugely less refined and manufactured and not generally shipped all over the world.

Sunbeam over the blackberries

Half eaten cherries

3 weeks ago, I spent a merry afternoon putting my hard earned boy scout knots to good use lashing together a fruit cage to put my cherry tree in. The tree is a graft of two varieties, I can’t remember their names, but one is about 3 weeks later than the other. Last year was the first year it was old enough to start fruiting and the birds got them before I did, so this year was going to be different.

Lashings of lashings

The cage was pretty simple, I used three 2 metre supports, three 1.5m crosspieces and three 2m diagonal braces, lots of garden twine and 4 metres of fruit netting from the local DIY shop. You do need one diagonal bracing (remember the triangles, always the triangles) per facing, otherwise it will fall over in the wind. If you can’t be bothered with that bit, then bury it in the ground a bit or pretend its a tent and deploy some guy ropes.

Finished fruit cage

The cage only has to be up for 4 weeks of the year, but even so, the corners do have to cope with a fair bit of abuse so make sure you do a good tight job of your square lashings and remember a few frapping turns. The diagonal bracings are better done with a lashing with more give in it, it’s the angles that hold it together.

Cherries!

Keeping on a cherry theme, it turned out to be worth the effort putting the cage together because one week later, we had our first handful of home grown cherries. They were sweet and juicy and whilst they weren’t quite as big as professionally imported ones, the smug factor was great. The second variety should be ready for harvest sometime this week, if the sun puts in an appearance again.

Jumbo gooseberries

The gooseberries have been picked and put straight into the freezer. This year I wound up with a smaller number of really big dessert gooseberries, which I think I’ll do on purpose next year. General opinion holds that one bush gives a certain weight of crop each year, so it’s up to you whether you want to have lots of middling fruits or fewer big ones.

In the intervening three weeks, the blackcurrants have ripened and been harvested. That bush is probably 5 years old now and is giving me about a punnet a year, which should be plenty for an blackcurrant jelly to have with roast dinners or one or two cheesecakes. I couldn’t decide so froze them too.

More scale insects than you could possibly imagine

Annoyingly, the blackcurrant bush has also produced a bumper crop of scale insect, I don’t think I’ve seen such an infestation before. Before I have to get my hands dirty and scrape all the buggers off, which would not be a fun way to spend an hour, I’m trying a two pronged approach to control it. The first was a few blasts from an extremely unorganic pesticide spray, which I’m sure won’t really work terribly well but the HSE won’t let you use proper stuff at home. I’m also leaving 10-20 berries on the plant and putting the plant out in the open, I’m hoping that will attract a few birds in who might think the scale insects would make a tasty course after nomming the rest of the berries.

The red currants are having a year off after the major pruning I administered last autumn, I had to cut out a lot of growth that would have fruited this year if the bush was going to survive in its pot. It’s grown back well, although the same can’t be said for the cuttings I struck in a pot. The cuttings that went straight into the ground have done exceedingly well, but in a pot? not so much.

Canna

The Canna I bought earlier on this year has grown well, although it’s turned out to be vulnerable to the wind that howls through our garden and its leaves have been shredded somewhat. They’re still attractive and it’s fine to grow in a pot, but it needs more shelter than our garden gives. A sunny corner, perhaps?

The sweet peas have grown well up the supports and the first flower has opened. We’ll have to remember to keep on top of picking them because the instant that a sweet pea plant sets a seed, it will stop producing flowers and start dying back.

Some of the courgette plants have established better than others, unfortunately I guessed wrong which bed would do better than the other so things are getting more than a little cramped in places. Still, I’m confident I’ll get a major crop of ball courgettes this summer.

Spinach “tarpy” did very well to start with, its unusually shaped leaves were fun and it coped well with everything I cooked it in, however, it’s completely bolted after about 12 weeks, so definately needs to a succession sowing each month. I’ve run out of space for that, though.

Tomato F1 “Totem” are doing as well as in previous years, bushing out nicely and generally holding their form. Unlike maincrops, you don’t need to go to the effort of pinching out the sideshoots, training the main stem up a support and stopping it when its as high as you. Throw the seedlings in the ground, wait a bit and eventually you get a nice crop of sweet tomatoes. I hope.

The peas and beans were a write off, next year I’m growing dwarfing varieties of each and direct sowing, probably without major supports.

Finally, the beetroot is developing nicely and a few roots have started to swell up, fingers crossed for that too.

Strawberry jelly ingredients

Ingredients

500g strawberries
200g sugar
juice of a lemon
10 gelatine sheets
1litre cold water
Handful of blackcurrants

Method

Put 100g of the strawberries to one side for later on and thickly slice the rest.

Strawberry nectar ingredients in the pan

Put the sliced strawberries into a large pan with the water and sugar and slowly heat up. Do not allow to reach a rolling boil, the idea here is to slowly infuse the water with strawberryness to produce a nectar, I didn’t want to break up the strawberries like you would if making a jam.

I wanted to slightly darken my jelly, so added a handful of chopped blackcurrants (not that I’d just picked this year’s crop or anything..).

Stir it as necessary and leave to slowly cook for about an hour.

Strawberry nectar

When your nectar is ready, pour it out of the pan into a measuring jug so you know exactly how much you’ve got. Follow the directions on the packet of the gelatine, a ‘normal’ set for the size of sheets I used is 5 sheets per pint of liquid. I had 1200ml of nectar and strawberries so 10 sheets is about right. If you wanted a looser set and didn’t mind it taking all night, then you could get away with slightly less, but no less than 8 1/2 or it’ll never set.

Fresh gelatine

Preparing fresh gelatine, provided you don’t think about where it comes from, is pretty straightforward. Use kitchen scissors to cut it up into little shards so it’s easier to stir, put it into a flat bowl and add three tablespoons (45ml) of cold water. make sure it’s covered. Then put the bowl over a bain marie to gently melt the gelatine. You’ve already got a jug full of cooling strawberry nectar, so I’d suggest using that as a source of steam. It takes a few minutes to melt.

Melted gelatine

Whilst that’s melting, cut up the remaining 100g of Strawberries across the grain so their faces look attractive. Put the fresh strawberries into the moulds such that the faces will be upwards on the plate. I used glasses so put them in afterwards facing upwards, if your moulds need turning out then place them at the bottom facing downwards.

Stir the lemon juice and gelatine into the strawberry nectar and pour it out into your moulds. I used some individual glasses and did a job lot in some tupperware so I can have jelly all week.

Put it in the fridge and let it set. Mine took overnight before it would stand up to gravity.

Strawberry jelly

If your moulds aren’t for serving directly, there’s a little trick to make the jelly just slip out of the moulds. Get a bowl of boiling water and briefly put the moulds into it so the jelly just round the outside melts just enough to become slippy.

Serve with clotted cream and a couple of leaves of fresh mint.